Romulus the founder of Rome enters an underground room in the Forum. He is old, his pulse weak, his service to the city complete. His senators in their purple-striped togas follow him into the room, which has no windows and only one door. What follows is a classic sealed room mystery: Romulus is never seen again.
He vanishes.
‘So then.’ His stepfather liked to unstrap his sword and rest it across the arm of his chair. ‘Tell me what happened. Work out the crime, and how they made him disappear.’
In popular legend Romulus had rejoined the gods. A story spread that instead of dying Romulus had ascended to heaven, which explained his missing body. This was not the answer Cassius Gallio’s stepfather wanted. When Gallio first suggested the ascension of Romulus as a solution, his stepfather had unsheathed his sword and whacked him across the thighs.
Eventually Gallio’s stepfather spelled out the lesson he wanted the boy to learn: a rational explanation is available. Romulus was murdered by the senators. Of course he was. Always suspect those closest to the victim.
The senators had closed the door and stabbed old Romulus in silence, alerting none of the Forum’s hyper-alert slaves. Then they knelt to dissect the body. Each senator concealed a small section of flesh or bone beneath his toga, and they carried Romulus away from the sealed room in pieces. The cuts of meat they dispersed through the city, flushed into cisterns or tossed to scavenging dogs. No trace of Romulus was ever found.
True story.
‘We thought the Israelis were going to finish off the cult on our behalf. They made a decent start.’
Valeria walks quickly, wearing trainers with her skirt and sleeveless top, a tourist like any other. She has her familiar fast stride, and Cassius Gallio admires the vigour that comes from a lifetime of civil service health insurance and not making mistakes.
She stops and points out a street where the locals stoned a Jesus follower to death, a short while after Gallio’s disgrace. An Israeli agent called Saul set up the hit to showcase his talents, but the street has reverted to what it was and always will be: shopfronts filled with toiletries and battery-powered fans. Gallio checks they’re not being followed. Jerusalem puts him on edge.
‘Ruthless, ambitious, highly capable. We liked the look of him. Saul was the kind of driven local agent who didn’t need our help.’
Valeria walks on. Gallio lets her go, watches her hips sway left and right, her buttocks, then catches up. ‘Saul targeted Peter in Damascus,’ she says. ‘A trained international agent against a lake fisherman in a major world city. Should have been a mismatch.’
‘But it wasn’t. Peter turned him. Saul became one of them.’
‘Well done. I’m glad not everything has passed you by, but the truth is we didn’t have a back-up plan. We kept to our civilised policy of not intervening in religious affairs. Saul was converted, but even then we expected the Jesus cult to fold.’
‘But it didn’t. It hasn’t.’
‘It hasn’t followed the usual pattern of Judaean self-hatred and implosion, no. Every year the number of Jesus believers increases, and across a wider geographical spread. We underestimated them.’
‘You don’t say.’
The disciples of Jesus had negated a crucifixion and rigged a burial. They could break in and out of a sealed and guarded tomb, leaving no trace, and managed to hide a body in a city under martial law. Simple upcountry peasants? Cassius Gallio didn’t think so.
‘They could organise a fire,’ he says.
‘Possibly. What’s certain is the disciples have a history. Whatever they’ve become will depend on what happened in the past. We need people who were there at the beginning, and who appreciate the specific difficulties.’
They walk into a cavalry exercise ground, separated from the housing scheme behind it by a high link fence. On the far side of the fence, the public side, about fifteen to twenty gawpers — including children, an Asian family — cling to each other and cry out. Yellow crime-scene tape flutters across the door of a stable, the centre stall in a block of five.
Gallio is first to duck under the tape. Old habits.
Inside, a free-standing aluminium spot-lamp heats up the base note of rotting straw and horseshit. Two objects on the ground. The first looks like a hessian sack, but closer up the lump is beige clothing silted with blood. Gallio holds his hand across his nose. Get closer, right up close, because closeness comes with the job, and a nub of tendon glistens in the half-light, where the head should be. Blackflies rise from the severed neck, settle on the top of the spine.
Above the lamp, Gallio notices, looking away and up, and further up, anywhere but down, afternoon sunshine pierces the knotholes in the roof slats, light coming through in pinpoint beams. He looks back down. The second object is the head. Valeria finds a riding crop on a nail in the wall. She asks Gallio for a handkerchief, and uses it to handle the whip, which she unhooks and pokes at the severed head. It lies stubbornly on one side on a patch of straw. She levers the head upright, it pauses, seems for a moment to be the head of Jesus (long brown hair, beard) then topples back onto a blood-caked ear.
‘You were there. You saw the twelve of them together. Is this Jesus?’
In Benghazi, staring at a pathway of moonlight across the water of the bay, Gallio had allowed the killers of Romulus a change of clothing and rolls of plastic bags. He could speculate about their actions but couldn’t unmake the world he knew: with minor improvements their murderous scheme looked plausible. The senators would need odourless floor-cleaning materials, concealable in a toga. He gave them some water, or sand. A brush, a mop.
Gallio spent night after night picturing eleven Galileans in a sealed tomb lit by flickering lamp-flames. Busy, each and every one of them, as they carved away flesh from the bones of Jesus. The disciples sawed through ligaments and tendons, then broke the skeleton, bone by bone. The tomb belonged to Joseph of Arimathea, private property, and he could have stored cleavers and a hacksaw in advance, along with other useful supplies: fresh clothing, rolls of plastic bags, cleaning materials (water, sand, brush, mop). On an earlier visit Joseph could have left a commercial pestle and mortar. The disciples, most of them with a background in manual labour, silently grind the skull of Jesus into powder, non-stop in shifts for seventy-two hours. Three days and the labour of eleven men to annihilate a human body.
These were the same men who hanged Judas and made it look like suicide. The disciples could have made Jesus disappear, and Gallio knows people exist who can do such things to others they once fully loved. He reads the newspapers. He keeps up to date with human atrocity.
Logistically, eleven adults (one with basic medical training) could have dismantled the body of Jesus in three days. The disciples were absent from the crucifixion, but not because they were scared of being arrested. While the authorities were distracted by the death of Jesus, the disciples hid inside the tomb. When Jesus was carried in they were already concealed inside, waiting with their knives and buckets, their plastic aprons and gloves.
The tomb was then sealed, which would have muffled any noise, and the soldiers on watch heard nothing. To be fair, they weren’t making an effort to listen, even though Gallio had ordered them to guard the dead man as if alive. He used those exact words and signed the order himself, and at the military tribunal his signature was used against him. ‘Unhinged,’ they said, because dead men don’t need a guard. ‘Not in his right mind,’ because tombs remain closed without a seal.